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William Van Cleave, a defense adviser during the Reagan administration and an associate of a number of hardline and neoconservative policy outfits, is the founder and former chair of the Defense and Strategic Studies Department at Missouri State University, a bastion of veteran conservative policy elites. Van Cleave is a longtime advocate of increased military spending and a more aggressive defense policy, including a more flexible nuclear weapons strategy, the deployment of a comprehensive missile defense system, withdrawal from arms control treaties, and unwavering support for military hardliners in Israel.

In the 1970s, Van Cleave was a leading figure among a group of Cold Warriors who opposed détente with the Soviet Union and were critical of what were regarded as the moderate threat assessments of Soviet military strength and global ambitions. Van Cleave was a member of the infamous Team B Strategic Objectives Panel, an independent threat assessment committee authorized by George H.W. Bush, director of central intelligence in the Ford administration. Other team members included Richard Pipes (father of Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum) and Gen. Daniel Graham, whose "High Frontier" missile defense proposal foreshadowed President Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, or "Star Wars." The team's advisory panel included Paul Wolfowitz, Paul Nitze, and Seymour Weiss—all close associates of Albert Wohlstetter, the influential defense scholar whose articles on purported U.S. vulnerability to Soviet attack in the 1970s provided much of the intellectual thrust for the campaign to overturn détente. Van Cleave was also an executive member of the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), a political action group that shared the alarmist threat assessments of Team B many of whose members went on to serve under President Reagan.

At Missouri State University, Van Cleave has been part of a circle of like-minded hawks, many of whom were part of the 1970s-era CPD and who later championed an aggressive war on terror in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Faculty members have included: J.D. Crouch, on loan to the Bush administration, where he currently serves as deputy national security adviser; Keith Payne, founder of the hawkish strategic affairs think tank National Institute for Public Policy (NIPP) and former chair of the Bush administration's Deterrence Concepts Advisory Panel; Henry Cooper, a former head of the Strategic Defense Initiative and founder of the pro-missile defense group High Frontier; William Graham , a former Reagan administration adviser whose record includes membership on Donald Rumsfeld's Commission on the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States and executive of various defense contractors, including R&D Associates and Jaycor; Charles Kupperman, a former Lockheed executive and director of Empower America; Ilan Berman, president of the hawkish American Foreign Policy Council and a member of the neoconservative-led CPD; and Robert Joseph, the undersecretary of state for arms control, former director of studies at the National Institute for Public Policy, and a former advisory board member of the Center for Security Policy (CSP).

Van Cleave is associated with an array of hawkish think tanks and advocacy groups, including NIPP, CSP, the Israel-based Ariel Center, and the Hoover Institution. He was a team member of a group that authored a NIPP strategy document titled "Rationale and Requirements for U.S. Nuclear Forces and Arms Control," which some have argued served as a blueprint for George W. Bush's Nuclear Posture Review (see William D. Hartung, About Face: The Role of the Arms Lobby In the Bush Administration's Radical Reversal of Two Decades of U.S. Nuclear Policy).

Van Cleave is also a co-director of research at the Jerusalem-based Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (IASPS), a think tank closely associated with the Likud Party and military hardliners in Israel that also has an office in Washington, DC. Among IASPS's claims to fame is its 1996 publication, "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm." The paper's recommendations pressed Israel's then-incoming Likud government to scrap the peace process in favor of a hardline posture aimed at attacking states like Syria and Iraq. Because two of its contributors, Douglas Feith and Richard Perle, years later obtained high-level posts with the George W. Bush administration, commentators cited the paper's authorship as evidence that the Bush administration was unduly influenced by Mideast ideologues who were determined to use the war on terror to reshape the region .